In their essay “Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network,” Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz define a truly transnational analysis as one that “draw[s] multiple circles, replanting the foot of the drawing-compass in different, central points, moving across different scales of observation” (229). The metaphor of the drawing compass is an apt one to describe the work accomplished by Pamela L. Cheek in Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, since she ambitiously identifies multiple centers and complex layers of exchanges and redraws the picture of a nuanced and interconnected literary Europe.
This remarkable volume provides a forceful gesture of reorientation for the study of women writing in Europe in the long eighteenth century. A wide-ranging comparative study, it reassesses fundamental networks of literary and cultural collaboration, influence, and descent by addressing the interconnection between a localized geographical scale and...
